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Category: Insight

Understanding Social Media

I have added a new first step to my strategic social media engagement process. It involves educating key senior stakeholders within your organization as to what social media actually consists of. Without this, I am convinced that your journey towards successful use of the digital space will be unnecessarily difficult.

Put simply, you need to ensure that key senior stakeholders as well as everyone involved in the initiative that you’re about to undertake  have at least a high-level understanding of the current digital landscape, including statistics, trends, and implications of both engaging and not engaging.

A few updates and learnings

This last month of October has been quite eventful for me in terms of work and travel. Some of the organizations I was privileged to work with on various elements of strategic digital engagement include:

  • Treasury Board
  • City of Hamilton
  • Canada Health Infoway
  • Baycrest
  • Ministry of Natural Resources (Ontario)
  • Government of Manitoba
  • Government of Alberta
  • Government of Saskatchewan

A few things I learned last month:

  • Mobile is finally creeping onto the radars of senior management. I know it may not seem like it to most public servants, however there are plenty of initiatives currently underway that should be launching over the course of the next year. To date, the largest list of mobile initiatives I have managed to collaboratively compile within the Canadian Government can be found on www.mobilegovernment.ca

Privacy? What’s that?

The largest shift I’ve seen over the course of the last year in the digital space has been regarding the concept of privacy.

As always, I like to start with a definition:

“Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively. The boundaries and content of what is considered private differ among cultures and individuals, but share basic common themes. Privacy is sometimes related to anonymity, the wish to remain unnoticed or unidentified in the public realm. When something is private to a person, it usually means there is something within them that is considered inherently special or personally sensitive. The degree to which private information is exposed therefore depends on how the public will receive this information, which differs between places and over time. Privacy is broader than security and includes the concepts of appropriate use and protection of information.” -Wikipedia